'Tis a second existence. Every friend is good and wise for his friend: among them all everything turns to good... There is no magic like a good turn, and the way to gain friendly feelings is to do friendly acts... Seek some one every day to be a well-wisher if not a friend; by and by after trial some of these will become intimate.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The least cynical maxim in a famously cynical book, and among its most practical. Friendship, the maxim insists, is built by method: friendly acts create friendly feelings, one well-wisher sought daily, and time plus trial converts a fraction of them into intimates. The compounding is slow and the withdrawal season is late: the difference between old age with a full room and old age with a phone that never rings was decided by deposits made thirty years earlier, when both men were too busy to notice they were choosing. And the second-existence line is literal: your friends hold copies of you, your history, your reputation, your better opinions of yourself, retrievable when your own copy is damaged.
Practice
- Run the daily deposit: one message, one call, one small good turn to someone who can do nothing for you this quarter.
- Maintain across distance and seasons; friendships die of nothing but neglect, and one real exchange a quarter is the entire maintenance fee.
- Do the friendly act first and without a ledger; the accounting version of this maxim produces contacts, which are a different and lesser asset.
Use this when
- Use this hardest in the crowded decades, forty to sixty, exactly when busyness makes the deposits feel skippable and their absence is compounding.
- Use it beyond your own age band; friends a decade up teach you the road, friends a decade down keep you current, and both outlast batchmates.
Ignore this when
- Don't crowd the portfolio with everyone; his sequence is well-wishers many, intimates few and proven (maxim 156 does the vetting).
- Don't befriend as strategy; people file the difference between warmth and networking within minutes, permanently.
A picture of it
At the hospital, the difference between the two retired colleagues in adjacent rooms was not medical. One had a visitor problem: the nurses had to ration the flow, old juniors, a neighbour's son he had tutored, the canteen owner from three postings ago. The other had a silence his family took shifts to fill. The first man had spent thirty years making small deposits he never once recorded. The second had been, everyone agreed, too busy for all that, and his career, which had gone slightly better, sat with him now, making no conversation.
Friendship is the only fund where the deposits are pleasant and the maturity is a second life. Start today; the term is long.